3rd - Berlin |
Abstracts of the Presentations
Tutorial: OAI and OAI-PMH for Beginners
An introduction to the Open Archives Initiative and the Protocol for
Uwe Müller (Humboldt University), Pete Cliff (UKOLN) and David Casal
(University of East Anglia)
Originally developed as a means for metadata dissemination of preprint
and eprint servers, the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
meanwhile has become a widely known solution to connect distributed
electronic archives of all kinds. The OAI-PMH owes much of its
acceptance not only among experts to its simplicity and the
comparatively very low costs of its implementation.
After a brief outline of the protocol's genesis and its development to
date this tutorial will give an introduction to the main ideas of the
OAI-PMH, its general functioning and some protocol details. Then we will
deal with special implementation issues for data providers and service
providers including both the necessary steps for a local implementation
and several examples of freely available and adaptable tools for
implementations. The tutorial will also provide an overview of the
implementation of a data provider metadata set.
The OAI tutorial includes presentations as well as short breakout
sessions with the possibility to discuss special implementation issues.
Handouts including a glossary of terms will be provided. The tutorial
should be attended by persons who are interested in more technical
aspects of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
OAI-Tutorial in English
ppt-slides, 540 KB
Example of a Data Provider Implementation
tar, 47 KB
OAI-Tutorial in German
pdf-file, 2162 KB
Technical Validation Questionnaire - interim results
Birgit Matthaei (Humboldt University Berlin)
The Open Archives Forum started a first Technical Validation Questionnaire in
preparation for the first OA-Forum workshop in Pisa. The objective was to
provide an overview on status, experiences and future plans regarding the
workshop participants' OAI implementations. At this time exclusively
participants of this workshop were demanded.
In Pisa a high interest raised on the results of this small survey and the
OA-Forum project received feedback indicating that it would be a good idea
to collect experiences from a broader spectrum of OAI implementers as well
as to learn more about starting conditions of those planning to implement
or ones just beginning.
The focus of interest was on fundamental questions like: Is there a large
common ground and therefore good conditions for cooperating and learning from
each other, or are requirements so individual that necessarily many further
isolated solutions will be developed? Do the existing instruments for
implementation fulfil all requirements or should tools and protocols
correspond more than before to the needs of different communities?
Thus in the second questionnaire we added or changed some questions and
extended the duration. Beside this, we expanded the target audience for the
questionnaire and subdivided the form to account for those projects that
have not yet integrated OAI-PMH in addition to those who are experienced
Technical Validation Questionnaire
This second, long-term survey will continue through autumn 2003. The
presentation offers interim results of the information the participants
gave till now about used software, implementation costs, offered spectrum and
interoperability, experiences and expectations in different communities
and in different countries.
ppt-slides, 910 KB
prometheus - the distributed digital image archive for research and tuition
Georg Hohmann (University of Cologne)
As part of its "New Media in education"- program the German Federal Ministry
of Education and Research is financing the cooperative university project
"prometheus - the distributed digital image archive for research and tuition".
The three-year project has set to work in April 2001. The partners are the
University of Cologne, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Justus-Liebig-University
of Giessen and the University of Applied Sciences of Anhalt at Dessau/ Köthen.
The aim of prometheus is to provide a unified interface to a conceptually very
large number of different image data bases that focuses history of art and
archaeology. The basic philosophy of the project is, that the individual image
databases can have arbitrary different formats, which are unified by a server
acting as a technical - and potentially conceptual -"broker". Based on this
joined image archive und its media specific potential, prometheus will provide
a variety of didactic units to support academic teaching and (e-)learning in the
disciplines of Art History, Classical Archaeology, and Design History.
The prometheus central server uses a data model developed over the years for
historical research, which build upon the idea of semantic network data bases.
In recent years it turned out, that the data structures which can be administered
by the system - kleio - are a superset of the data structures which can be
expressed by XML. The stage one solution - the contributing data bases send
XML dumps to the central server, which maps their structures and semantics into
a common system - is currently being replaced by stage two, where instead of
dumps being transferred the contributing data bases are mapped dynamically.
If we see the OAI as an attempt to provide integrated access to heterogeneous
data sources by a specific protocol discipline required of the contributors,
prometheus might be seen as the opposite end, as all the effort in the integration
is taken care of by the central server, making no specific requirements of the
contributing systems. Providing OAI access to all the contributing databases,
simply by supporting the protocol by the server in this way, would be easy. It
is not planned for, however, at the moment: Among other reasons, as that would
make the handling of existing copyright restrictions all the more difficult.
ppt-slides, 152 KB
Building Digital Multimedia Libraries using MILESS and MyCoRe
Frank Lützenkirchen (University of Essen)
MyCoRe is an Open Source project for the development of Digital Library
and archive solutions (or, put more generally, "Content Repositories" >>
CoRe). In the MyCoRe project a group of universities is working on the
development of a shared software core for such applications. This core
will be adjustable to local requirements and easy to modify. This is
expressed by the "My" in MyCoRe, which represents the local
adaptability. On the basis of this core which will be available under
the open source GNU General Public License, specific local applications
will emerge at the participating institutes. The technical base of the
system is formed of Java class libraries, XML technology and, besides
Open Source database backends, IBM Content Manager and IBM DB2 for large
The Core Functionalities of MyCoRe include the following:
Document and Person Metadata, Internal logical Filesystem, Hierarchical
Classification System, User and Rights Management, User and Author
Editor Interfaces, Distributed Search Function and Interfaces for OAI
and Web Services.
The project roots in the MILESS Project of the University of Essen,
where a Digital Library application consisting of Java servlets and
applets was developed on the basis of the IBM database solution Content
Manager. MILESS contains a collection of multimedia teaching and
learning materials like animations, audio, video, images, and full text
files. It is mainly local material produced in Essen or being used there
which is managed with the MILESS system. Since MILESS was developed to
fit the local needs in Essen it was never a primary goal to create a
product that would flexibly adjust to the requirements of other
locations. Out of the first group of later MILESS appliers to which the
University of Jena (Urmel) and the University of Leipzig (Quästur, Bach
Digital) belong, the "MILESS Community" emerged (>> "M...y CoRe").
Within this community a detailed idea of the general requirements of
Digital Library applications, their common structure and possible
differences, was formulated. Out of this dialog grew the decision to
develop a shared software core for the different local applications
based on the experiences with MILESS. This core is MyCoRe system.
MyCoRe is an Open Source product under the GNU General Public License.
The System will be realized on the basis of Java. It will be a
serverside application built of Java applications and Java servlets. The
import and export format for the describing data will be XML. For now
the IBM Content Manager and IBM DB2 will be used as database backend.
But the system is generally designed to employ also other backends
(especially those developed as Open Source products and applying XML
technology) in the future. Adjustability, extensibility, and open
interfaces are fundamental design premises. To permit as many local
applications by "configuration in place of programming" as possible is
the main task.
The OAI and OAI-PMH:
How did we get here, and where do we go from here?
Herbert van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
has its roots in the Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).
The motivation to launch the OAI was to facilitate transformations in the
scholarly communication system through specifying technical interoperability
between nodes of such a system. That initial quest led the OAI into the realm
of defining a generic protocol for Metadata Harvesting that can be used well
beyond the initial application domain.
Now that the stable version 2 of the OAI-PMH is in place, the OAI is
reflecting on its mission for the years to come, and refocusing on the original
scholarly communication domain is high on the list of priorities. The
keynote will address the original motivation to launch the OAI, and it will
describe the evolution of the OAI work since its launch in 1999. It will also
explain the areas of e-print interoperability that the OAI is interested in
focusing on in future work, and it will discuss novel uses of the OAI-PMH in
areas that go well beyond the typical realm of resource discovery.
ppt-slides, 578 KB
Demo: Open URL Registry
avi-file, 1104 KB
Demo: OAI Usage Logs
avi-file, 856 KB
The avi-files are TSCC compressed. If you want to read
them in good quality you can download the
Camtasia Player (bottom of this page). Easier but with less quality is it to load
Discovering Good Practice: Metadata and the NINCH Guide
Ian Anderson & Seamus Ross (HATII, University of Glasgow)
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) "Guide to
Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage
Materials"2 is unique in being practice based and
expert led. The Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII)
at the University of Glasgow was contracted to undertake extensive research on current
practice in digitisation on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus the Guide was based on
empirical research, and offered good practice from some of the world's best-established
digitisation projects. The NINCH Working Group, who conceived and brought the
Guide to publication, strengthened the Guide with input from some of the leading
experts in the field. This ensured that the Guide was not only timely but could
highlight emergent trends, technologies and strategies. The Guide looks to the
future as well as reflecting present processes.
The Guide highlights a variety of approaches to metadata amongst the projects
analysed and interviewed by the HATII team. This diversity was not only a consequence
of the variety of collections - text, image, sound and moving images - but a result
of the different institutional contexts in which projects developed, the legacy of
analogue cataloguing methods and different technological choices. Methods for
representing metadata include: MARC, EAD, DC, TEI, TIFF, XML, and SGML. Thesauri
and controlled vocabularies include: LCSC, CDWA, AAT, VRA, TGN, TGM, and ULAN.
As this range of acronyms indicates, most projects adopted a hybrid approach to
metadata creation, adopting and adapting various standards and technologies
according to the type of metadata being created and project requirements.
Although projects were creating metadata to recognised standards and protocols
that would enable interoperability, few took a pro-active approach to this.
Whilst there was awareness of initiatives such as OAI, METS, CIMI and SMIL
projects were adopting a 'wait and see approach'. This cautious approach was
not only a result of the immaturity of these initiatives but reflected problems
with existing metadata creation, particularly in the descriptive field. Even
with institution or project based searching many projects struggled to reconcile
accurate descriptions of their digital collections with absent or inadequate
thesauri, subject classifications and name control files. As initiatives such
as OAI come on stream parallel developments such as the UK Archival Thesaurus
may help solve these problems. Nevertheless, the greatest challenge facing
multimedia repositories may be populating interoperable metadata frameworks
rather than implementing the technology.
ppt-slides, 152 KB
Paul Child (University of East Anglia)
Projects are temporary. They have a defined beginning and defined end. As
project workers, we would like our work to live on after the project has
finished. The most common way of ensuring this longevity is to make it
interoperable with the widest number of other systems that we can. This can
be a daunting task for a relatively short lived organisation and
complicating factors such as dealing with multiple media types and the need
to reconcile project aims with the interoperability goal can only make the
ArtWorld began in 2000 as a three year project, led by the University of
East Anglia and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.
ArtWorld provides access to primary visual resource materials for the
enhancement of learning and teaching in world art studies. It is a
consortium project comprising art museums, university departments and
research institutes in England centered at the University of East Anglia,
Norwich, and the University of Durham. Resources are being built by a team
including teachers, students, museum curators from the consortium together
with external IT consultants.
In this presentation I will outline the current status of the ArtWorld
project and how the project team has approached the difficulties in
reconciling multimedia types, interoperability and conflicting project aims.
ppt-slides, 69 KB
Resource Selection and Data Fusion in Distributed Multimedia Digital
Libraries: The MIND Approach
Fabio Crestani (University of Strathclyde, UK)
MIND is an IST project funded under the EC Fifh Framework. It is
led by the University of Strathclyde (UK), with the University of
Florence (Italy), Duisburg (Germany), Sheffield (UK), and Carnegie
Mellon (USA) as partners. The project started in January 2001 and
is approaching a conclusion.
MIND addresses some of the issues that arise when people have
routine access to thousands of heterogeneous and distributed
multimedia Digital Libraries. Today, a person must know where to
search, how to query different media, and how to combine
information from diverse resources. As Digital Libraries continue
to proliferate, in a variety of media, and from a variety of
sources, these problems of resource selection and data fusion
become major obstacles, as solutions based on a centralised
repository of metadata will battle with scalability and
In this talk I will give a brief overview of the results achieved
in the MIND project. I will also outline the differences and
similarities between the MIND and the OAI approach to accessing
multimedia information in distributed Digital Libraries. Although,
very different and starting from almost opposite assumptions, I
hope to be able to show that there is strength in a possible
combination of the two approaches.
pdf-file, 2695 KB
3rd - Berlin |